SUpport MOzilla's official blog – rocking the helpful web since 2007!

Contributor spotlight: John99

Mozilla, and specifically SUMO, relies on the talents of our contributors to make a difference. This month we’d like to give a big shout out to one of our Top Ten Contributors: John99

John99 hails from Liverpool, on the coast of the UK. He has been interested in computers for many years. He has a particular interest in learning about Linux. You can find more information about John99 on his profile.

He has provided over 3500 answers to questions in our forum. Over half of these were first responses- which are key to getting our users the help they need. He’s been a contributor for a couple of years, and has made a real difference.

More and more people are using Firefox and are coming to the Support Forums to get answers. We’re hoping that by spotlighting some of the main contributors we might encourage new people to try out helping in the forums. All it requires is a quick sign up for an account, and taking the time to find answers. John99 wanted to point out that ‘superheroes’ aren’t a large and elite superclass- they are regular people, just like you, who put in time where they can to help. Our contributors are made up of all kinds of people, with all kinds of skills – and anyone wanting to help with Mozilla should be able to find some niche that suits them.

What do we do? From John99, “We are trying to point users at Knowledge Base articles (and maybe similar solved questions). We try now to do that partly by improving the design but are always needing more people to help. If you are a coder or great computer whiz-kid there are all sorts of thing you could help with. But what we really need are simply more people. If you can use a browser you can help answer questions! What we require are more eyes on questions and hands on mice.”

Localization is another way to help. From John99, “I do not know too much about computers, although I may wield a screw driver on them sometimes and my coding knowledge is so rudimentary as to be of no use but there are always things anyone can do to try to help with Firefox. Most of course is English based, which is convenient for me as it is the only language I can speak, but there are is always a need for help with translation and localization, or maybe just answering the few support questions that are not in English. ”

John99 finds answering SUMO questions ‘quite addictive’. He believes anyone who can use a browser has a good chance of learning quickly how to answer questions.

He recommends starting with a couple of unanswered questions. He often chooses ones that relate to crashes- which are incredibly important for users needing help.

How else can you help? From John99, “Many answers may be found in the Knowledge Base articles. If you can not find an answer in the KB then maybe we need to know that; because other users will also miss an answer; does the KB need an additional article, or just an additional keyword added? Again not long ago we had a few staff and only a couple of regular writers of KB articles.”

We’d like to send a hearty ‘Thank you!’ to John99, and hope that his experiences encourage new contributors to participate. Get started now!